All hail the peacemakers 19

DURING WORLD WAR II, when German bombers terrorized Britain, a small group of gallant airmen faced them every day. Their life expectancy was numbered in days.

Once, a genius at the propaganda ministry devised a poster: "Who is afraid of the German Luftwaffe?"

When it was posted at one of the Royal Air Force bases, an anonymous hand penned underneath: "Sign here".

Within hours, all the airmen had signed.

These were the men about whom Winston Churchill said: "Never have so many owed so much to so few!"

If somebody today were to devise a poster asking "Who is afraid of the settlers?" I would be the first to sign.

I am afraid. Not for myself. For the State of Israel. For everything we have built during the last 120 years.

LATELY, MORE and more people in Israel and around the world have been saying that the "Two-State Solution" is dead.

Finito. Kaput. The settlers have finally killed it.

Peace is finished. There is nothing we can do about it. We can only sit in our comfortable armchair in front of the TV set, sigh deeply, sip our drink and say to ourselves: "The settlements are irreversible!"

THE ARAB taxi driver who brought me to Ramallah had no trouble with the Israeli border posts. He just evaded them.

Saves a lot of trouble.

I was invited by Mahmood Abbas, the President of the Palestinian National Authority (as well as of the PLO and the Fatah movement) to take part in joint Palestinian-Israeli consultations in advance of the international conference in Paris.

Since Binyamin Netanyahu has refused to take part in the Paris event side by side with Mahmood Abbas, the Ramallah meeting was to demonstrate that a large part of Israeli society does support the French initiative

I KNEW he reminded me of somebody, but I couldn't quite place it. Who was it who pounded his chest with such vigor?

And then I remembered. It was the hero of a movie that was produced when I was 10 years old: King Kong.

King Kong, the giant primate with the heart of gold, who scaled huge buildings and downed airplanes with his little finger.

Wow. President Kong, the mightiest being on earth.

SOME OF us had hoped that Donald Trump would turn out to be quite a different person than his election persona. In an election campaign you say many kinds of inane things. To be forgotten the day after.

THE MOST incisive analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I have ever read was written by the Jewish-Polish-British historian Isaac Deutscher. It consists of a single image.

A man lives on the upper floor of a building, which catches fire. To save his life, he jumps out of a window and lands on a passerby in the street below. The victim is grievously injured, and between the two starts an intractable conflict.

Of course, no metaphor is completely perfect. The Zionists did not choose Palestine by chance, the choice was based on our religion. The founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, initially preferred Argentina.

I BELIEVE I was the first to recommend that the soldier Elor Azaria, the killer of Hebron, be granted a pardon.
But this recommendation was conditional on several requirements: first, that the soldier openly and unconditionally confess his crime, that he apologize and that he be sentenced to many years in prison.
Without these conditions, any request for a pardon by the soldier would mean an approval of his act and an invitation for more war crimes.

NAPOLEON CAME to a German town and was not welcomed with the traditional artillery salute.
Furious, he summoned the mayor and demanded an explanation.
The German produced a long scroll of paper and said: "I have a list of 99 reasons. Reason No. 1: we have no cannon."
"That's enough'" Napoleon interrupted him, "You can go home!"
I WAS reminded of this story some two weeks ago, when I read Yitzhak Herzog's 10-point peace plan.
Herzog, the leader of the Labor Party, is an honest and intelligent person. All the bad things written about him when it seemed that he was crawling towards Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition have been refuted by the recent disclosure about the Aqaba peace initiative.

Now that Israel has passed a law barring entry to those calling for a boycott of even settlement products, I’m wondering if I should throw my weight behind full-fledged BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) after all. Driving me into the arms of BDS is probably not what the bill’s drafters had in mind, but ill-conceived legislation often has unintended consequences.
In 2012, I wrote in Haaretz that “boycotting the settlements might allow those of us who oppose the occupation a new and more finely-honed expression of our Jewish identity.” It’s an argument I repeated here six months later.